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What have I been reading -- well, just finished The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand, an intellectual history of the late nineteenth century focusing on William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Charles Peirce and John Dewey, though the real stars appeared to be the minor characters, like Chauncey Wright, who died at 45, and whose main interest philosophically was in a disquisition on the weather -- a Bergsonian, real-time weather, not the cyclical weather of a "pre-Modern" sensibility" -- and how it works to create progress because (in Menand's words) "animals have no power to develop by themselves." In Wright's words:
Changes of growth are affected by those apparent hardships to which life is subject; and progression in new directions is effected by retrogression in previous modes of growth. The old leaves and branches must fall, the wood must be frost-bitten or dried, the substance of seed must wither and then decay, the action of leaves must every night be reversed, vines and branches must be shaken by the winds, that the energies and the materials of new forms of life may be rendered active and available.
Well, this seem "just poetry" out of context, but in the context of the burgeoning discussion of pragmatism it's potent stuff, especially as it incorporates and builds on Darwin's then-new ideas about species development.
The weather in New York today seems moderate from the perspective of my desk but alas so much shitty news is coming down the pipe, whether of Senators, snipers or Chechens (and it's not because of this that I post this excerpt but it struck me), that any philosophical discourse that could act against the gloom is ok with me.
Posted by Brian Stefans at October 26, 2002 01:33 PM